Back At Bat

The main emphasis of post-cancer-treatment treatment is testing, to see if it's come back. Evidently the first year is very typically when it does.

In my case, evidently it has.

After the radiation treatment, we let things calm down for some months, then went back to the radiologists' kit bag and did CT scans, visual inspections, and finally a PET scan, my first since long ago. PET scans are where they inject you with a tracer, lie you down on a bed, and run you under a big machine. It detects metabolic activity that indicates cancer.

This new one, done about ten days ago, showed some faint activity on the right side of my neck. (The first time round was the left.) So my surgeon, the cool New Zealander, brought me in and did an ultrasound - the thing they use with pregnant moms to see their babies - and found two lymph nodes that seemed irregular. He did a needle biopsy, and the pathologists' results are now in. The tissues are "suspicious", which according to Dr. Haughey translates to something like a 75 percent risk of cancer.

So, back under the knife, with a procedure very much like last year's. Put me to sleep, remove a large sample of the nodes, test, and if cancerous go in and take out a lot of surrounding tissue. Plus the doc takes what he calls his "little telescopes" to look around the oral cavity and see if can find anything suspicious, which one often does with head and neck cancer.

In my case, of course, we will be resuming the hunt for the occult primary - the primary cancer that we never found the first time. I am starting to think of this as like the hunt for Osama Bin Laden - send in some Special Forces with lasers and get Occulta Bin Cancer.

I go in on Washington's birthday (New System, Julian Calendar), February 22. An auspicious start. Back up at bat, swinging for the fences again.